Last week we heard a lot about the 25th anniversary of the invention of the world wide web and the genius of Sir Tim Berners-Lee (left). So we thought it would be fun to look at some of the highlights of the coverage and present our favourite web facts:

1. Tim Berners-Lee presented his idea for the web in a paper called “Information Management – a proposal” in March 1989. It was originally designed to be a forum for the scientific community to share their research online; his boss’s initial response was ‘vague, but exciting’

2. The worldwide web was almost named TIM (The Information Mine)

3. A measure of the success of the web is how long it took to reach 50 million users: it took broadcast radio 38 years and television 13 years. The web got there in four.

4. Three quarters of UK adults use the web every day, but 4 million people still don’t have access to it. There are 4 billion people worldwide who can’t access the web.

5. The availability of answers on the web means that we’ve forgotten how to remember things – now that almost anything can be found in a few clicks online, it’s hardly necessary to retain information anymore. Researchers believe this is making us superficial thinkers.

6. The web isn’t the same as the internet; the internet is the network of computers that sends information around the world; the web is just one of the applications that uses this network, in the form of millions of pages of data. I like the analogy of the postman and the letter.

7. There are almost a billion websites globally, although ‘only’ around 180 million are active. Every month Google processes 100 billion queries, and of these, about 15% are questions that it has never seen before.

8. The Observer columnist Henry Porter describes the worldwide web as “not merely the greatest invention since writing” but “the most revolutionary event in the history of the human psyche since the first hunter-gatherers began to conceive of gods who had access to their most private thoughts”.

9. Our addiction to the web leads to some anti-social behaviours – according to The Times, 36% of children and 33% of adults use electronic devices during family meal times, amazingly that figure is 88% amongst 12 -14 year olds.

10. This is my favourite ‘fact’ – the internet (including the web) weighs as much as one strawberry. Apparently, physicist Russell Seitz has worked this out based on some atomic physics assumptions and the billions and billions of ‘data-in-motion’ moving electrons on the internet, and come to a figure of 50 grams – the weight of a strawberry.

So happy birthday to the web, and happy birthday to Fingertips too – we are one year old this week, something only made possible by Sir Tim’s vague but exciting invention.